Disable cell id generation while working on jupyter notebooks locally

[Manvi-Agrawal]

Disable cell id generation while working on jupyter notebooks locally

[tcNickolas]

Hmm, that's interesting. I was sure it's a side effect of different versions or different tools that people use to edit the notebooks, rather than something specific to the content of the notebooks. I've noticed before that people editing notebooks would introduce the cell ids, but once I edit them on my setup, the ids would go away again. The BasicGates workbook from your example does not have cell ids despite being on version 4.5, because I was the last person to edit it and my installed version of nbformat is 4.4.0.

That being said, I'm happy to test this hypothesis by downgrading the version in the notebooks to 4.4 :-) It shouldn't break anything - I think everybody can edit the notebooks with any version of tools installed regardless of the version in the notebooks.

[Manvi-Agrawal]

Yes @tcNickolas, you are right. Interestingly, my local machine is on nbformat 5.4. My guess is that jupyter does the following:

• For brand new notebooks, jupyter stores the local version of nbformat in notebook.
• For notebboks that already exists, it does not oveeride the versions but tries to use it as a baseline
  • for older notebooks <4.5, it does not generate cell id
  • for notebooks that specify nbformat>4.5, if locally we have nbformat >= 4.5 with no ids in notebook, it tries to generate ids.
  • for notebooks that specify nbformat>4.5, if locally we have nbformat <4.5 then it removes the generated ids because it does not recognise that field.

This might be the reason for the disperancy. I have validated locally that after this change, I am not facing the issue. So, hopefully other contributors should also not face this issues post fix. Fingers crossed. :-)

Here is the PR with nbformat version downgraded to 4.4 as per your suggestion : #825